Traders at a financial institution often need quick, relatively instantaneous, secure access to traders at other financial institutions who trade in the same or similar products. As such, financial institutions historically pay large fees to set up direct connections over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and/or legacy Time Division Multiplexed (TDM) networks from their trading desks to similar trading desks at other financial institutions. Such connections are typically time consuming to setup and expensive to setup and maintain.
It would be advantageous to create a relatively inexpensive system for use with the Internet or some other wide area network, which provides continuous and/or substantially instant access between groups of individuals.